Sweetpea: The Unlikely Serial Killer

Rhiannon Lewis is a girl who leaves no trace of herself. She goes unnoticed in the corridors of the office where she works as an administrative assistant for the local newspaper, ignored by colleagues and superiors. A victim of cruel bullying during her school years, she has built her existence on invisibility, taking refuge in a protective anonymity that allows her to survive without being further hurt.

In Sweetpea, when her father, who has been hospitalized for a long time, dies and her little dog is run over a few hours later, something inside her definitively breaks. The return to Carnsham of her former high school tormentor, Julia Blenkingsopp, now an established real estate agent ready to snatch her family home, is the last straw. Rhiannon thus discovers she possesses an unexpected and cathartic talent: being a perfect serial killer. And that first seemingly random victim, a troublesome drunk who had urinated a few meters from her, pushes her to transform her "black-list" into a real list of people to eliminate to quell her repressed anger.

Lady Vengeance

Released in its home country in 2024 and now also available in Italy in the Amazon Prime Video catalog, the adaptation of CJ Skuse's novel of the same name, published seven years earlier, arrived in a particularly fertile period for stories that explore female fury through the filter of the psychological thriller. The result, packaged in six episodes of about forty-five minutes each, is an operation that has found its audience, enough to guarantee a renewal for a second season coming soon.

Rhiannon is a victim who becomes an executioner, a woman invisible to the eyes of the world who identifies in spilled blood the only means capable of finally making her exist. It is no coincidence that she herself, also to divert investigations, personally handles the articles about the murders for the newspaper where she works.

The protagonist is played by an excellent Ella Purnell - already a star of Fallout - who described the project as an improbable cross between Dexter and Fleabag, a comparison that is anything but casual: we find the same ability to create complicity with the viewer, here reinforced by the constant voice-over that opens each episode with the chilling formula of "people I'd like to kill", transforming the darkest thoughts into a daily mantra.

It is precisely in this dimension of intimate confession that Sweetpea finds its most recognizable characteristic, oscillating between irreverent and atypically light moments, in the name of black comedy, and sudden psychological jolts with a destabilizing impact, as the epilogue of the first season particularly demonstrates.

One After Another, Without Looking Back

The screenplay, and with it the original literary material, avoids reducing this last-minute killer to a caricature, rejecting exaggerated mannerisms in favor of a more nuanced approach, capable of making her a figure with whom to empathize even when she makes obviously wrong decisions. The progressive erosion of a convulsive psyche is carefully constructed: Rhiannon punishes the guilty, yes, but above all she tries to fill that existential void that has devoured her for years, since that adolescent episode that represented only the origin of the current point of no return. It matters little that many victims were not entirely innocent, an element that can serve as a partial mitigating factor for a trail of violence now out of control, useful for placating the remorse of a conscience that resurfaces intermittently.

Some passages seem to suggest a reading of emancipation - the woman who rebels against a society that has always trampled her - while others emphasize the deeply psychopathic nature of her actions. This continuous oscillation between registers creates a disorientation that does not always play in favor of the narrative, risking unbalancing a story forced to rely on the versatility of its interpreter, who remains the main strength of an operation as captivating as it is perfectible.